Weeks 46 & 47: Change in vine design!

Not much of an update, unfortunately. It’s been hard to find time and motivation to work on THE MISSION because it’s a lot of animation work that needs to be done, which isn’t my forte. I’ve been trying a method of roughly blocking out the “ensnared by vines” animation, putting in the game, and then evaluating it for further iteration.

Which has led me down a certain line of thought. Even while testing the vines killing the players if they don’t get out of the way quickly enough, it feels like it might be just too hard. This is a bit bothersome because I want the game to be hard. But in the multiplayer mode, if players are getting frustrated from dying because of environmental dangers instead of having a blast killing each other, then the “vines can kill players” feature is a bad idea.

General principle: if a feature is frustrating, it’s a bad feature and deserves to be cut. Damn! (Obviously this is a generalization, applicable more to small features than large. Large features are probably core to the game and can’t really be cut, but must be modified and refined.)

Next is to modify the vines so they simply close up when no player is in their tile.